


hunger and thirst for righteousness

by smilebackwards



Series: Washington's Modern Spies [2]
Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Captivity, Gunshot Wounds, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, M/M, Rescue Missions, Spies & Secret Agents, background Peggy/Andre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-14
Updated: 2016-09-14
Packaged: 2018-08-14 19:08:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8025523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smilebackwards/pseuds/smilebackwards
Summary: Ben can’t believe he’s done this to Caleb. Disappeared, leaving a blood stain behind.





	hunger and thirst for righteousness

When Ben carefully broaches the subject of a transfer to Naval Intelligence, he’s not met with rousing success. Sackett makes conciliatory noises but Director Arnold all but laughs in his face. 

“Benjamin,” he says, condescending, “we don’t just give up agents with your success rate. Especially not to rival agencies.”

Ben hates when people bring up his success rate. He’s only failed one mission, but it was the most important one. They never found Nathan. Not even a body to bury.

Ben doesn’t try to point out that their so called rival agencies are all on the same side. That they share a country and a President and, at least theoretically, ideals. It took Ben longer than it should have to learn that didn’t really matter to some people when compared to who got the credit, who got the photo ops and the accolades. 

For the director of a supposedly covert agency, everything Arnold does is carefully calculated for maximum visibility. His office is a shrine to his own self-importance. The walls are covered with Arnold’s medals, pictures of him shaking hands with President Washington and various heads of state. 

Ben has half a dozen commendations, a meritorious service award. The only thing he keeps on his desk is the picture his father took at his Yale graduation: Ben in his ridiculous cap and gown, bracketed in by Sam on one side and Caleb on the other. They both looked so proud of him. Sometimes Ben needs the reminder.

At least he gets to come home to Caleb now. They skipped straight ahead to the living together stage. Ben looked it up online and that’s usually considered a relationship milestone about a year in, but it took him and Caleb over a decade to say I love you so Ben figures they can accelerate some of the rest of the timeline to catch up. He may or may not have a ring secreted away at the back of his sock drawer. Ben likes to be prepared.

“Hey, babe,” Caleb says when Ben walks through the door. He’s making stir fry and he turns down the burner to come give Ben a thorough kiss hello.

“Hello,” Ben says back, after, breathless, and Caleb laughs and kisses him again.

Caleb kisses him goodbye the next morning too and there’s something brimming under his smile that Ben wants to know about, but Caleb says he’ll see soon enough and nudges Ben out the door. 

Ben obsesses about it all morning until reception calls him down at noon to badge in a visitor. They don’t give him a name and Ben glances around the atrium until his eyes land on Caleb and his mouth drops open.

“Surprise,” Caleb says, grinning. “I am officially transferred to the CIA and can now watch your ass 24/7.”

Ben grabs him in a hug. “I tried to join the Navy,” Ben admits. “Arnold wouldn’t let me.”

“That’s some straight up Gift of the Magi, right there,” Caleb laughs, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “Wait, what do you mean he wouldn’t _let_ you? They can’t force you to stay here.”

Ben hums noncommittally. He doesn’t want to tell Caleb he’s not exactly sure what all he signed when he joined the agency. He hadn’t been in a good place. 

“Let’s go upstairs so you can meet everyone,” Ben says, taking Caleb by the wrist to lead him toward the elevator banks that need key-turn entrance. 

Behind them, someone at the front desk says, “I’m here to see Mr. Sackett. Tell him he has a walk-in.” 

Ben and Caleb’s heads turn on a swivel. There are certain terms you learn in the espionage business: a dead letter box is a drop point, a pavement artist is a tail. A walk-in is a spy from an outside agency willing to offer information.

Ben steps over. “You’re looking for Sackett?”

The man is tall, with light brown hair and thin, aristocratic features. “Yes,” he says, carefully. His accent is British.

“I’ll take him up,” Ben tells the receptionist, showing her his badge. Walk-ins need to be handled quickly before they change their minds, walk out, and get shot for defection.

Ben lets one of the security officers pat the man down before he and Caleb resume walking to the elevators, now plus one. Caleb stays a careful half step behind in case the man tries anything. Any spy worth the title can still kill you at least thirty different ways regardless of being stripped of weaponry.

“What’s your name?” Ben asks.

The man regards him with pale brown eyes. “John André.”

Something about the name rings vaguely in Ben’s head but there are dozens of British or British-born spies and their names and aliases revolve monthly. “Anna,” Ben says, when they step off on the twelfth floor, “could you call Sackett down, please?”

Anna stares at André. Ben gets the feeling she knows exactly who he is. “Yes,” she says, picking up her phone.

Sackett arrives less than three minutes later. He peers at André through his round spectacles and says, “Recall Agent Turner at once.” 

Ben wonders why they need Abigail; she’s not an interrogator. He calls over to Operations to relay the message.

Anna gives them the historical gossip while Sackett contacts Director Arnold and gets an interview room ready. Apparently, John André is a top agent at MI-6 and the husband of former CIA agent Peggy Shippen. He and Peggy had met on assignment, both sent to retrieve the same intel, and they’d chased it and each other across five countries and fallen in love on the way. Peggy married him and joined British Intelligence and the CIA in general and Director Arnold in particular are intensely bitter about it. Abigail had been Peggy’s best friend and confidant and she’d risked the political backlash to her own career to attend the wedding and maintain contact.

“This is turning out to be a very interesting first day,” Caleb says and Ben realizes he hasn’t even properly introduced him to Anna.

“Sorry,” Ben says. “Caleb, this is Anna. Anna, this is Caleb Brewster. He’ll be working with us starting today.”

Anna shakes Caleb’s hand. “Caleb like Ben’s Caleb?” she asks, angling her head toward the photo on Ben’s desk.

“Definitely Ben’s Caleb,” Caleb winks while Ben puts his face in his hands to hide his blush. “And your reputation precedes you. All I’ve heard from Selah in months is Anna, Anna, Anna.” He mimicks Selah’s voice, “‘Caleb, did you know Anna is the most beautiful woman to ever grace the face of the Earth?’”

Anna laughs. “He’s sweet.” 

Across the hall, Sackett waves Ben toward the viewing room. Ben takes Caleb with him. 

André looks imperturbed behind the one way glass. “Simcoe is mad,” he says. “He’s been responsible for multiple murders over the past year in his relentless pursuit of Robert Rogers for some imagined slight.”

Ben touches a hand to the scar on his shoulder.

“Why hasn’t MI-6 reached out to us before? Through legitimate channels?” Arnold asks skeptically.

“No government wants to admit that one of their own has gone rogue and they haven’t been able to handle it in-house,” André says. “Especially if it’s suspected that they’re complicit in the loss of an ally’s agent. Nathan Hale was one of yours if I’m not mistaken.” 

Ben clenches his hands into fists. He fails to see how it’s better to admit it now, almost a year after the fact. After they’ve had the memorial service and inscribed Nathan’s star on the wall of the lost. Caleb works Ben’s hand open and laces their fingers together.

Sackett looks at André curiously. “Why are you telling us now?”

André opens his hands. In his left palm is a curled lock of golden hair. One tip is red, matted into a point by dried blood. 

André’s previously stoic face looks broken open when he says, “He has my wife.”

-

It takes Abigail fifteen hours to arrive from Brazil and she stays for approximately forty minutes, to validate as much of André’s story as possible since traditional polygraphs are essentially useless against spies who’ve all been trained to trick them, before Sackett sends her straight back to her post, against her protests.

André protests too when Ben and Caleb are assigned to help him track down Simcoe instead. He looks at them with a derisive eye. “An analyst and a probationary agent?”

“Agent Tallmadge has been a full field agent for over a year now and Agent Brewster comes to us from another intelligence service,” Sackett says calmly. “They’re eminently capable.”

“They’re who can be spared,” Arnold says, less flatteringly. 

When Sackett and Arnold had come into the viewing room to confer, Arnold had had to be talked around to offering any help at all. “Miss Shippen,” he’d started before Sackett had cut in to correct him with “Mrs. André”—Ben had always gotten the impression Sackett rather disliked Arnold—and he looked like he’d bitten through a lemon. Arnold hadn’t corrected himself, just continued on, “is no longer part of the CIA. Her retrieval should rightly fall to her new employers at MI-6.”

“Very well,” Sackett said, with the ease of someone who had a trump card in hand. “But the matter of Nathan Hale surely falls to us and we must exact justice on his behalf. A joint operation, yes? I’m glad you agree.”

By the time Arnold had unfrozen from his impotent, apoplectic fury, Sackett had already made the promise to André, named the operation Cato, and started organizing resources. Arnold had no choice but to go along with it. 

“You really have all the fucking James Bond shit here,” Caleb says gleefully, when they go down to the quartermaster to get outfitted. Caleb signs out a pair of palladium cufflinks and a lighter that doubles as a grenade from the inventory even though Ben can’t think of any real practical use for them. He’d picked up a few extra magazines for his Glock and a tac vest and been done with it.

“Anna swears by the goodnight kiss lipstick,” he says.

Caleb abruptly sobers. “You’ve never had to—”

“No,” Ben assures him. If just a smile and an excuse doesn’t get him out of being caught somewhere he shouldn’t be, Ben goes straight for a throat punch. Anna’s the one who taught him the art of a proper throat punch, but she tries more often for subtlety.

André is waiting for them by the exit. A nondescript, black canvas bag is slung over his shoulder and Ben wonders what he considered necessary equipment for this op. “Let’s go,” André says, impatient. “A lead came through on Simcoe. Sighting in Denmark.”

Ben takes a deep breath. He rests his hand on the butt of his Glock.

Caleb squeezes his wrist reassuringly. “Let’s go,” he echoes.

-

The thing about espionage is that it’s at least 90% waiting; watching people through binoculars and windows, listening in on boring conversations about picking up milk and who was eliminated on last night’s episode of Survivor. 

Ben didn’t even know Survivor was still airing. He stretches his shoulders and hands off the binoculars to André.

Ben puts his Glock on the table and starts disassembling it, checking the trigger assembly and the firing pin. He can put it back together in less than twenty seconds. In the dark. He’d done it a few weeks ago at the apartment with Caleb watching through night vision goggles. Caleb had said it was one of the hottest things he’d ever seen and pushed Ben back against the table. Ben left smears of gun oil all over the backs of Caleb’s shoulders.

Ben can tell Caleb’s remembering it too. His eyes are bright when he winks at Ben.

Ben fumbles the slide and André snorts. “Have you ever even fired that?” he asks.

Caleb looks like he might come over and punch André in the face. Ben waves him off. Whatever André thinks of them, they’re all he’s going to get. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Ben replies. He means it to be quelling, but it comes out colder than he intended. 

André looks at him curiously, reassessing. “This _is_ personal to you, isn’t it?” he asks, incisive.

Ben looks down at his gun, dragging the brush through the barrel carefully. A jammed gun in the field is as good as a death sentence. “Nathan Hale was my best friend,” Ben says, and racks the magazine home. 

-

When it comes down to it, it’s not the gun that jams, it’s Ben. 

He’s gone down to the corner store for Gatorade and chips and the hazelnut spread Caleb likes, leaving Caleb asleep in their tiny hotel room and André on watch. It’s the first time any of them have been alone and Ben should have known it was a bad idea, the perfect moment for an ambush. He’d just thought they were the ones who’d be doing the ambushing. They’ve carefully traced Simcoe through Denmark and France, into the small town of Lago Verde, Italy. They ought to be the hunters, not the prey.

Ben catches sight of his tail in the sideview mirror of a parked car. He drops his bags and dives, coming up on one knee with his gun up. Ben looks at the man in front of him, caught flat-footed, and he has almost a full second to fire, but he falters. 

The man doesn’t. Ben can feel the bullet rip through his side. 

After Ben killed Scar—whose name had turned out to be Anatole Kasnovich—in Yemen, the agency had forced him to talk to a psychologist. Ben knew all the right things to say and he’d said them because the CIA didn’t keep agents that regretted doing their duty, that might not do it a second time, and part of Ben didn’t regret it, but he still woke up in a cold sweat at least twice a week for the first month after and hadn’t been able to get back to sleep until Caleb held him for a solid half hour and did breathing exercises with him.

Ben loses his grip on his gun as the man and his partner frogmarch him to a van. He forces himself to hold pressure on his side as he’s thrown across the back seat. They ditch Ben’s cell phone and pull his concealed knife from his boot like they knew it was there.

Ben can’t believe he’s done this to Caleb. Disappeared, leaving a blood stain behind. It’s the worst kind of cruelty, and for Caleb he’s only ever wanted to be kind. 

Ben tries to use the tricks he learned in training to estimate his location—count the seconds, feel for turns and the bumps of train tracks—but the pain is like a haze. Ben doesn’t know how long it is before he’s dragged into a building, down two flights of stairs, and tossed into a windowless room that seems to pass for a cell. He can hear the door bolt behind him.

A woman emerges slowly from the shadows in the corner. Her golden hair is darkened with grime, her cheeks sunken in with hunger, but Ben recognizes her from the photo in the CIA dossier and the dozens of sketches André had done of her, laughing and bright, on napkins and Post-it Notes and the backs of reports, like a compulsion. Her eyes are lit blue.

“Are you Peggy?” Ben asks. At least he’s accomplished this objective.

She looks at him cautiously. Ben imagines his wound is actually a point in his favor at the moment. She lowers the piece of wood in her hands. “Yes,” she says, careful. “Who are you?”

“I’m Ben,” he offers. Just Ben for the time being, since Ben can’t recall his active alias through the pain. The only surname that comes to mind other than Tallmadge is Brewster. _Benjamin Brewster._ God help him, Ben feels it has a certain ring to it. “I’m with the CIA. Your husband came to us for help.”

“John?” she says, a tremulous hope in her voice. “I knew he’d come for me.”

Ben tries to smile. “I suppose he’ll have to come for me now too. I apologize for the poorly executed rescue.”

Peggy kneels down to look at Ben’s wound. “Well, you look like you tried your hardest,” she says, kindly. “And they took away my last company. He was American too. Simcoe seems to have something against us.” She rips a wide strip from the hem of her already tattered blouse and folds it into a compress to hold against Ben’s side.

Ben wonders if they put him in with Peggy because they thought he would have died of his wound without anyone to render at least the most basic first aid. He wonders if it will matter.

“A civilian?” Ben asks. He hasn’t heard of any American spies going missing in the past few months, although that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.

“He didn’t talk to me much,” Peggy says, shaking her head. “I think he thought I was a plant, that Simcoe was trying to trick information out of him. But I heard one of the guards call him Hale.”

Ben feels his heart jolt. _Nathan._ It’s been eight months now, but they never found a body. Even with the star carved into the wall, Ben never quite gave up hoping. He grasps Peggy’s hands. “Peggy,” Ben says. He can hear the pleading in his own voice. “Peggy, is Nathan alive?”

She looks surprised, but she doesn’t pull back her hands. “I— Yes, I think so. They moved him back out just a few days ago.”

Ben feels dizzy. He’s not sure if it’s giddy relief or blood loss. Anything might have happened in the intervening days, but the chance that Nathan is still alive is a miracle. The best Ben had hoped for was empty revenge.

There’s a soft clang as a slot in the door is opened and bottle of water and a paper plate with a pitiful hunk of bread are pushed through. “Dinner,” Peggy sighs, standing to go retrieve them.

Ben doesn’t complain when Peggy uses some of the water to clean his wound, but when she tries to get Ben to eat the bread, he pushes it gently back to her. She’d had a narrow face with high cheekbones in the photo. Now that thinness has turned gaunt. Her cheekbones stand out sharp as razors.

Ben hasn’t been locked up here for weeks. He thinks back to the spaghetti and meatballs Caleb cooked him just last week. Ben closes his eyes and tries to hold onto the memory of Caleb’s smile before he’d prodded Ben to reenact the classic Lady and the Tramp scene with him, each slurping one end of a piece of spaghetti until they met in a kiss.

Peggy taps him on the knee. “Who are you thinking of?” she asks, the first shadow of a smile on her lips. 

“Caleb,” Ben says. “My boyfriend.”

Peggy moves over to sit beside him, shoulder to shoulder. “Tell me about him.”

“Caleb is wonderful. He cooks spaghetti and plants petunias in the windowbox. He makes me watch terrible spy movies and then tell him all the ways I could have completed the objectives better.”

Peggy laughs. “John reads me Shakespeare’s sonnets and writes music in four-part harmony. It should feel terribly pretentious, but it’s lovely.” She loops an arm through Ben’s and rests her head on his shoulder. “I’m not worried,” she says, with quiet conviction. “They’ll come for us.”

Ben thinks of Caleb’s hands covered in dark soil as he carefully planted flower bulbs in the windowbox that Ben had once halfheartedly filled with sage only to forget and find the plants shriveled and brittle weeks later. He thinks of the handful of dark earth Caleb spilled into Sam’s grave. 

Ben feels a shiver wrack up his spine, a counterpoint to the heat radiating from his side. 

He doesn’t doubt Caleb will come. He just hopes he’ll come soon enough.

-

“So you’re the analyst,” Instructor Scott had said, sweeping Ben with a disdainful look from his black-framed glasses down to his loafers, when Ben showed up at The Farm for field training. 

“Yes, sir,” Ben said.

“That asshole,” Scott said, shaking his head. He’d put a hand on the shoulder of Ben’s argyle sweater and added, not unkindly, “This isn’t some Cinderella story like Arnold wants. You’ll wash out in under a week and we’ll get you back to your desk.”

Ben graduated top of his class.

Scott found him before he left and gave Ben the Glock 17 he still uses. Better sights than the standard issue 22. “Don’t die out there, kid,” Scott told him, perhaps the fondest thing Ben had ever heard him say to anyone.

Ben hates to be a disappointment. He forces his eyes open. He doesn’t know when he drifted off. Peggy isn’t beside him any more. The room is empty. 

Ben lifts his shirt to look at his wound. The ragged skin at the edges is reddened and warm to the touch, telltale signs of infection.

The door creaks open. It must have been the sound of the bolt drawing back that woke him. Ben expects to see Peggy but it’s a man that gets shoved inside. He manages not to fall but he hunches over, hands on his knees like a winded runner. Or like a co-ed after a frat party who’d had to stop and throw up in the gutter every thirty feet on the way back to Calhoun.

Ben struggles to sit up. He uses the wall to stand. “Nathan?” 

Nathan raises his head. His face is thinner even than Peggy’s. “Ben?” he says, disbelieving, like it’s Ben who’s been missing.

Ben steps forward to hug him loosely. Nathan tightens his arms and Ben can’t hold in the noise of pain. Nathan lets him go immediately and steps back to look at him. “Did you get shot again?” 

“Yes,” Ben admits. There’s not much he can do to hide it. The blood has long since soaked through his shirt and Peggy’s makeshift bandage.

“Christ, sit down,” Nathan says, lowering Ben back against the wall and dropping beside him. He peels up Ben’s bandage and then puts it back down, poker-faced. “What happened? How did you find me?”

Ben doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t know how to tell Nathan that it’s Peggy they came here for, that the most they’d truly hoped for Nathan was justice for his restless ghost. 

Nathan knows the protocols better than Ben. “It’s been over six months,” he says, considering. “They gave me a star on the wall and stopped looking, didn’t they?”

“I’m sorry,” Ben says, the guilt of it almost more than he can bear. If he’d just persisted. If he’d asked the right questions of the right people, with the right amount of money in hand... “It’s my fault. They sent me to Singapore after you disappeared. I couldn’t find anything, not a trace.”

“Ben, if _you_ couldn’t find anything, then there was nothing to find,” Nathan says. He puts a hand on Ben’s face, the way Caleb does sometimes, but Caleb does it just because, affectionate. Ben’s pretty sure Nathan is checking him for a fever and that he’s going to find one.

“They’ve moved me half a dozen times. I’m not even sure what country we’re in now,” Nathan adds.

“Italy,” Ben tells him.

“Those bastards,” Nathan says, staring balefully at the blank concrete walls around them. “I’ve always wanted to see Italy.”

It’s right outside. The rolling hills and vineyards. The white statues and cobbled streets. The gelato shop where Caleb took Ben, André trailing irritatedly along behind them, and watched indulgently as Ben debated between raspberry and pistachio and vanilla bean before he’d stepped forward and told the owner they’d like all three, _per favore._

“You’ll see it,” Ben promises, determined. “We just have to find a way out.”

Nathan snorts. He tugs the collar of his shirt down to reveal his left shoulder, bare but for a raised pink scar an inch wide. Ben’s seen enough scars to know it’s from a knife. “This is what I got the first time I tried to escape.” He twists to reveal a similar scar on his side, the placement almost identical to Ben’s wound. Ben wonders if they got them from the same man. “This is from the second.”

Ben doesn’t ask if there’s a third. “Then we’ll wait,” he says. “Caleb’s coming.”

Nathan’s face lights up. He looks like the Nathan Ben remembers. “ _Caleb? Your_ Caleb?”

Of course. Nathan’s been gone for eight months. The last he knew, Caleb was Ben’s unattainable childhood crush, off on a three year deployment with the Navy. Ben still remembers how drunk he’d been the night Nathan finally got him to spill that close-held secret.

“Ben,” Nathan pleads, “I’ve been months in this hellhole without the least bit of office gossip. You can’t just dangle that in front of me.”

Ben has always been weak to Nathan’s begging eyes. “All right,” he says, and tells him everything.

-

“I knew the two of you would get your shit together,” Nathan crows after Ben has regaled him with all the non-redacted details of his and Caleb’s twisted romcom of a love story. 

“You met Caleb once,” Ben says, rolling his eyes. It had been at Sam’s funeral. No one had been their best selves.

“I knew,” Nathan says resolutely. “You didn’t see the way he looked at you.”

“How did he look at me?” Ben asks, although now that he lets himself believe it, Ben knows exactly how Caleb looks at him, how he’s maybe always looked at him.

Nathan shifts so Ben is resting more comfortably against his shoulder. “Well I sure as hell don’t doubt he’s coming.”

Ben fades out for a while, occasionally jerking abruptly awake the way he used to do in college when he’d fallen asleep over his textbooks. His brain knows that he needs to be present, it’s just hard.

Nathan is talking, a little too quickly, forced bright. “I honestly think he’s just holding me as some kind of future leverage at this point. I told Simcoe everything I knew about Rogers months ago. He didn’t even need to drag it out of me. I hope Simcoe tracks him down and they off each other. It would save us all a lot of trouble.”

Ben should be listening better—they’re going to need to put this kind of information in the inevitable reports—but he keeps losing the thread.

“They like to do this whole musical chairs with our cells,” Nathan says as the bolt in the door draws back. “I think it’s supposed to be psychological. Never let us get comfortable in one place or something. Simcoe seems like he’s into that kind of shit.” His voice is nonchalant, but he fights as they try to take him away.

When the guard drags Nathan up, Ben barely manages to catch himself on his forearms before his head hits the stone floor. He didn’t realize how much he’d been listing against Nathan’s shoulder. 

“Ben,” Nathan says, “hang on, okay? Hang on.” He turns to the guard and says, with all the desperation he’s been trying to hide from Ben, “He needs a doctor. You can’t just leave him in here and expect him to get better. The wound’s infected for God’s sake!”

Nathan doesn’t add that Ben’s going to die which Ben’s grateful for. He thinks it would be harder somehow to hear it out loud. Even just in Ben’s head, the idea of it echoes.

Another guard is pulling Peggy through the doorway. She takes in the situation at a glance. “I’ll look after him,” she tells Nathan, reaching out to clasp his hand. 

Nathan doesn’t look reassured. “He needs medicine, you assholes!” he yells as they drag him away down the west corridor. “Ben!”

Peggy sits down beside Ben, cross-legged, and lifts his head into her lap. Ben could have pushed himself up. He was just conserving energy. “So that was your friend, Nathan, I take it,” she says.

“He worries,” Ben says. Everyone always thought Ben was the worrier between them. Really Nathan just hides it better.

“So do I,” Peggy says, so quietly Ben’s not sure she meant for him to hear. She brushes Ben’s sweat-damp hair off his forehead.

Ben lets his eyes drift shut. He knows theirs is the compressed closeness of shared adversity, but Ben thinks he would have liked Peggy anywhere he met her.

“Ben,” Peggy says, her voice edged with distress. “Ben, tell me more about Caleb.”

 _Caleb,_ Ben thinks. Caleb will kill him if he dies.

Ben’s blood feels like it’s on fire. He hardly ever gets ill. The last time Ben remembers coming down with a fever was back in high school. 

Ben didn’t know how Caleb managed to climb up the trellis outside Ben’s window with a thermos in one hand, but he’d done it. Two plastic bags with THANK YOU stenciled on the side were hanging from Caleb’s wrist and he’d dumped their contents over the foot of Ben’s bed before crouching down beside where Ben had his aching head resting on his pillow. 

“Tallboy,” Caleb said softly, putting a comforting hand on Ben’s forehead, “your brother told me you were sick.”

“Yeah,” Ben said hoarsely, closing his eyes and relishing the coolness of Caleb’s palm.

“I brought you some tea. You need to stay hydrated. Can you sit up?” Caleb asked. He slipped an arm behind Ben’s shoulders to help.

“Thank you,” Ben said. He didn’t feel like he was going to drop the thermos but he wasn’t about to protest the way Caleb’s hands were pressed over his, holding it steady. He took a sip. Something herbal, with honey. It felt fantastic against the harsh dryness of his throat.

“I brought you a few other things too, in case you needed them,” Caleb said and Ben looked down at the mountain of supplies: NyQuil and wet wipes and tissues, cough drops in honey and citrus and medicinal cherry, a paperback copy of _To Kill A Mockingbird._ Ben felt his heart beating too fast, a new symptom.

Caleb put the thermos on Ben’s nightstand, in easy reach, as Ben slid back down to horizontal. “Feel better,” Caleb said quietly, pulling the covers up around Ben’s shoulders and slipping back out the window. 

Ben murmured a goodbye when what he really wanted to say was _please stay, hold me._

Sam knocked on Ben’s door a few minutes later, his backpack hanging off his shoulder. “Ben, do you need any—” He looked at Ben, surrounded by new boxes of tissues and six different flavors of cough drops.

Ben reached up to take a sip from the thermos to wet his dry throat. “I’m all right. Caleb came by,” he said, grateful for the excuse of fever to explain his blush. 

“I see,” Sam said, with meaning, and Ben put his face back into the pillow.

Ben turns his face into Peggy’s lap. He feels like time is slipping. He needs a doctor. He needs Caleb.

The door blows off its hinges without warning. Peggy screams and leans forward to cover Ben’s head with her body.

Caleb walks through the smoke like a goddamn action hero. “Ben!” he says, racing across the room and going to his knees beside him. Ben feels relief wash through him like a wave.

Peggy relinquishes Ben to Caleb and throws herself at André who pulls her tight against him, one shaking hand coming up to cradle the back of her head. “Darling.”

Caleb puts his hands on Ben’s face, on his shoulders, on his side. Ben winces. “Nathan,” he says, nonsensically, because his vision is darkening at the edges and he needs Caleb to know that Nathan’s here, that they need to get him out. And because Ben always manages to say the worst possible thing at the worst possible time. 

Caleb’s face goes pale. “Ben,” he says. “Ben, it’s Caleb.” God, he probably thinks Ben’s hallucinating. And hallucinating the dead is always a worse sign than hallucinating the living. Like the veil’s pulled back.

“He means we need to find Nathan,” Peggy explains, blessedly, from the shelter of André’s arms.

“Nathan Hale is dead,” Caleb says.

“He’s not,” Peggy argues.

“He’s not,” Ben says, grasping Caleb’s arm. “Caleb, he’s not dead. He’s here.”

“Ben,” Caleb says, “you need a hospital. There’s reinforcements on the way. If Nathan’s here, they’ll find him.”

“Please, Caleb,” Ben says. If they wait for reinforcements and lose Nathan again, Ben knows this time they’ll have lost him forever. Sam’s smiling face flashes behind Ben’s eyes. Ben’s older now than Sam will ever be. He doesn’t want to be older than Nathan.

Caleb’s expression does something painful. Ben knows it isn’t a fair thing for him to ask, that Caleb can never deny him anything, and now least of all. “All right.” Caleb jabs him with something Ben hopes is an antibiotic and gets Ben’s arm over his shoulder. “Up we go, Tallboy,” he says, levering Ben painfully to his feet.

“They only took him away again a minute ago,” Ben says.

Peggy makes a quiet sound. “It’s been at least half an hour.”

Caleb looks like he’s going to start saying hospital again so Ben takes a step forward. “This way,” he says, pointing down the west corridor. He knows he’s right about that at least.

André hands his Walther PPK off to Peggy to take point and drags Ben’s other arm over his shoulder. Ben feels useless, suspended between him and Caleb. He considers suggesting they find Nathan and then come back for him, but Ben knows what Caleb’s response to that would be. He concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other until the faint sound of a raised voice echoes down the hallway.

Ben feels his heart skitter and lurch. It’s possible the shot Caleb gave him was adrenaline. 

“Let me the fuck out!” Nathan is yelling.

The guard outside his door actually looks conflicted. Ben suspects Nathan has been a model prisoner, save for the escape attempts, up until now. They’d probably have killed him months ago if he kicked up this kind of fuss regularly.

Peggy shoots the guard without hesitation. Behind the door, Nathan goes abruptly silent. 

“Get back from the door!” Peggy calls before she shoots out the lock and kicks the door in. Ben thinks he would appreciate the look of awe on Nathan’s face better if he could see it in sharper focus.

Nathan’s gaze shifts to Ben. “Shit, why didn’t you get him out of here first? He needs a hospital.” He nudges André aside and loops Ben’s left arm over his shoulder. André picks up the downed guard’s gun and arranges himself as rear-guard.

“What I said,” Caleb says, pointedly, from Ben’s right.

Ben doesn’t have the energy left to reply. The world feels strangely dream-like, floating and dark all at once. He’s aware of a brief scrabble, but the next time Ben opens his eyes it’s to the wide open night sky. Sirius is shining down brightly. 

Caleb used to borrow his Uncle Lucas’ pickup truck and drive with Ben and Sam up to Pike Point on clear summer nights. They’d lie on their backs in the the flatbed and stare up at Draco and Ursa Minor. 

Once, when Sam was away at camp, Caleb just took Ben. Ben spent the whole trip paralyzed with giddy nerves but he still remembers it as one of the best nights of his life. Caleb had loaned Ben his over-sized sweatshirt and even though Ben had already known the story of Cassiopeia, it was a thousand times better hearing Caleb tell it.

The Italian night is marred by the blue and red flash of emergency vehicle lights; the promised reinforcements. There are four _polizia_ cars and an ambulance, flanked by two black SUVs. Caleb and Nathan turn as one toward the ambulance, dragging Ben forward.The EMTs notice them coming and start unloading shock blankets and equipment.

Ben doesn’t let himself become fully dead weight until he’s on his back on a stretcher. Caleb’s face swims above him. “Don’t you die on me, you dumb bastard,” he says. “Ben—”

-

Ben wakes up in an infirmary. It’s not Langley. Ben remembers the infirmary there from his last gunshot wound. There’s the same sterile smell, but the sheets are more starched, the furniture is shaped differently.

Caleb is dozing in a chair scooted up close to Ben’s bed, his head drooping beside Ben’s left side. Ben shifts until he’s almost sitting up and reaches across to cup his hand carefully over the top of Caleb’s skull. They must have him on the good drugs because it’s only mildly excruciating to lean forward.

Caleb wakes immediately. “Ben?” he says, clear-eyed in five seconds flat. His usually neat beard is starting to look overgrown.

“Caleb,” Ben says, “what happened?” He can barely remember the impression of bright light, a plastic mask over his face. 

“They did surgery on your side. You’ve been asleep for nine days,” Caleb says, without any of the reproach Ben deserves for letting his guard down, for allowing himself to be kidnapped, becoming a new part of the problem instead of being part of the solution. Caleb leans up to kiss Ben’s forehead and then does it again, resting his palm against Ben’s cheek.

“We’re in England,” Nathan says from the doorway. He has a half-eaten hamburger in his hand. Ben wants it with a frightening intensity. “You missed all the drama. Director Arnold was selling information to Simcoe and God knows who else. Sackett’s got a whole taskforce looking into it.”

Ben thinks of how the men who kidnapped him found the knife in his boot without even patting him down. He woke up with a bad taste in his mouth but now there’s a new sort of bitterness at the back of his throat.

“Your friend’s kind of an asshole,” Caleb says, giving Nathan a look. He’s always tried to pad anything he thinks might come as a blow to Ben. “But, yeah, apparently the Director is even more of one.”

Nathan grins, unrepentant. “At least your boyfriend’s awesome, right?”

“Right,” Ben says. He can hear about Arnold later. This is more important. “Caleb, I’m sorry.” Ben sees Nathan slip away out of the corner of his eye before all his attention is arrested by the guilt on Caleb’s face.

“It’s not your fault,” Caleb says. “I should have been with you. I shouldn’t have let you out of my sight.”

“You can’t be with me every second,” Ben says pragmatically. “I should be capable of watching my own back. But thank you. For coming for me.”

“Always,” Caleb says. Some of the color is coming back to his face. His voice turns teasing. “And you thought the lighter-grenade wouldn’t come in handy. I’ll need to pick up another one from inventory.”

“They do stock regular C-4,” Ben says.

“I’ll get some of that too,” Caleb assures him.

Ben smiles and it doesn’t feel as wan or tired as the rest of him. “Anything you want.”

Caleb climbs up on the bed beside Ben, careful of his IV line, and tucks himself along the curve of Ben’s spine. It’s what Ben wanted when he was sixteen and it’s what he wants now at twenty six, the warm circle of Caleb’s arms. 

Caleb presses his lips to the shell of Ben’s ear. “Tallboy,” he says, “I’ve got everything I need.”

  
  



End file.
